Black Between
by Tris'sLightningQuill
Summary: Throughout Anne McCaffrey, there is a repeated phrase; "Black Between." It's always held some majestic power for me. Anyhow, it's beautiful. Brekke's wanderings through her own personal between after the fatal mating flight. Please, please, R&R, thank you


It was like _between_. Only, she was alone; so terribly, utterly alone. Wirenth had gone _between_, but she was not here. She was not anywhere. She was gone. And Brekke was alone. In black _between_, she sought Wirenth, knowing she would not find her, unable to hope. She wanted to follow where Wirenth had gone... but she couldn't find where that was, could not find where _between_ ended, met a _between_ so black and cold and empty, Wirenth could not return.

Forever and no time she wandered that emptiness, calling out the name of her lost queen. Though she could not feel a ground beneath her, her feet were battered bloody. Though she had no voice, it became cracked and raw with screaming, and she tasted blood in a throat she couldn't feel. There was only the pain, and the cold, and the empty, despairing loneliness. But that was pain, too.

Sometimes, she could almost feel others with her there, reaching out to her in this void. She could hear their voices calling to her from nowhere, from everywhere, though always out of reach. She knew them not, and moved on, searching, seeking...she told herself she sought Wirenth. But Wirenth was dead. The voices tugged at her, pulling her away, and she fought. They meant to tear her away from this emptiness, but she could not leave without her queen...sometimes, concealed in empty blackness, she thought she heard the echoes of a dragon's voice, and her heart would leap, thinking it was her own come back to her. But the voice was deep, and male, and strange, and she fled in hatred and disgust. They would all lie to her.

When the blackness about her seemed to thin—a blind drawn over eyes and mouth and nose instead of the all-devouring abyss all around her—she thought perhaps she heard voices. Some she knew, others she did not. Her heart would burst with the longing to answer their call—they called to her, they spoke of her, they mourned—but she was smothered, and voiceless. Sometimes she thought she felt a hand on her, caressing her brow, stroking a long, tender arc from hairline to breast. Or rough hands at her shoulders, shaking her, a frenzied energy that leached over into that muffled aspect of her sense and made her helplessness only worse, or kind hands lifting her, urging her to drink. But her skin was dead, her muscles withered, frozen, and she was helpless, to answer, or to flee. Flee their care and their worry, and let this drowning pain take her, and pull her down in its dark spiral, where perhaps she could at last find peace. Perhaps find Wirenth. It was an empty comfort, the shattered shell of a lie, and she knew it. There was naught else she could say.

The blackness was cold, a frigid tomb beyond words or comprehension. Pain, suffering, loneliness, hurt, despair. The only heat, the shadow of the memory of life, was the heat of hatred and anger. Tears were hot.

She could not fall. She stood at the edge of all things, gazing down at the depthless beneath. A butterfly's cocoon teetering on the brink of a twig, had but to spread her wings... and fold them again. If she could but step, she could at last fall. But she could not. Inhibitions held her back, binding chains whose making was beyond her. She was inhibited, held back by rules she did not understand though must adhere. Where Weyr and Craft battled for her end, the fight between self and father, heart and soul. Could not rise. Could not fall. Could only linger in this dark place between waking and sleeping, enveloped in an almost tangible paralysis, this agonizing half-way of life and death. She knew she could not live. She longed to die. She could not.

Caught between the last world and the next, sometimes she could hear weeping. She did not know whether it was her own voice or another's, but often there were tears upon her skin, and blood. She could feel their burning there. Small talons of cold iron gouged a skin whose nerves were somehow wired to the mind that was her prison, and bloody furrows were left behind, the air upon the broken skin her only tie to reality. Small voices, chittering, _between_ to find her, but nowhere to be seen. Her _between_ was not theirs. Dragon-less, she could not answer their call, could not remember their names.

Hands upon her skin, stroking, small, shaking, gentle. Hard things at her lips, warmth spilling into her desiccated mouth, bitter and searing. Cool water, bitter also, bitter as the tears that coursed her face. The bridge over this gap between dreams and veracity, between memory and grief, between pain and agony, were these tears, a constant river of burning ice over her cheeks in the darkness, a tepid current dampening hair and pillow. They brushed her tears away with barbed fingers, shrapnel: with their tender care, they would tear her apart.

She wandered far, never knowing. Sometimes she could hear, and would dash herself against the platonic stones of her prison to surface from the black waters. Other times, she turned from them, contemptuous, despairing. They could not understand, could not see that the only way to kill this pain was to drown it. She drowned it in screaming, in the empty beat of breath as she ran, the motions that were never made. She ran forever, and could not escape them. The voices, sharp and shrill, small and insistent, made her crazy, nudging her mind this way and that, harrying, herding. Larger voices, too, the sweep of wings in the dark, and tears poured down her face, in hate and anger at the nameless, sightless beings for not being Wirenth. The voices, and names on the backs of her eyes, the velvety softness of warm dragonhide against her bare skin—naked and bloody in the dark, shredded like her soul—offered what comfort they could, crooning draconic cajolement and consolation that seeped deep within her and cooled the fire of hate and anger and checked the rising flood of despair. When she lingered overlong beside the edge of sanity, where the black and blue melded together in the bloodred haze, when there was hope of respite in the loss of everything, they would tug at her hair and hands, usher her away in the curved embrace of a brown wing, and there on the empty plain she would wander, lost. But she heard the whisper of coasting wings in the dark air about her, all around, sightless guardians, their voices pale and soft, but all around her. Within her shroud of darkness, she was always alone, but never unattended. Always nattering in her ears, filling her head, their voices made her crazy. Their voices kept her sane.


End file.
